Thursday: One of the worst days I've had in a long
time and one of the busiest (anybody would think that I
link those things together :o) Had 3 of the Stratus HP-UX
boxes collected, took about 3 hours trying to work out
which ones they were and then an age trying to navigate
them out of server rooms (who the hell put them right at
the back).

I think the I.T. manager may be reading my diary, today he
removed everyones access to the server room except mine
and refused to restore it until it was tidy, spent 6 hours
trying to chase cables.

Buggered my laptop for the second time this week, decided
that having DevFS mounted over the top of my old /dev was
untidy so I moved /dev and rebooted, then realised that I
hadn't created a /dev folder to mount DevFS in, trawled
freshmeat looking for a rescue disk that could handle
ReiserFS (may I recommend
Recovery
Is Possible), 5 minutes later, presto.

Keep being nagged about project slipage, so many things to
try and keep on top of atm.

Wednesday: E-Mail from heaven, I'm so happy I could
sing, my previous company is no longer trying to take me
to court and is willing to accept my offer, that
potentially makes me £3000 better of, I am so glad they
saw sense, I doubt I could have afforded the legal fees if
they hadn't.

I'm currently distressed that someone has rated me as
a
journeyer, makes no sense to me.

Tuesday: Feel guilty about lack of participation in
things Linux related, so I'm spending a large chunk of
time answering questions on the LFS mailing lists.
Keep being pestered to start tidying up the cables in the
server room, our IT 'Manager' is threatening to remove
access, if only he would my life could be a better place
to live, ho hum.

Am still getting to grips with the trust metric system
on advogato, was surprised when I logged on this morning
to find I'd been certified by a few people, nice to see.
In turn I went through each of the people looking at the
projects they were involved in and being distressed that I
had actually used most of them so I was aware of the
quality of coding, used this knowledge to rate them in
turn.
Not sure if that's right but it works for me.

Hmmm, talked someone though how to move the /boot
partition onto another drive and I carried out the
instructions my self to make sure I hadn't missed
anything, then moved it back, X locked my machine and
rather the use SysRq I just rebooted, guess who forgot to
rerun Lilo?
Had the lovely LI prompt.
One tomsrtbr+loadlin later and I'm back in business.

Moderate success on the Advanced Server Howto, left
DNS be
for the mo and carried on with squid and squirm, still
cannot decide between Apache Proxy and Squid, Apache seems
to do a better job of getting cache hits but Squid can do
a hell of a lot, setup squirm so that it blocks 90%
percent of web adverts, gave me a warm feeling inside.

Sunday:
Shoot the people who try to include SCART sockets on
devices, none of them are standard!
Woke up this morning with my Daughter complaining that the
Nintendo doesn't work, investigate the problem, the
Nintendo has picture but no sound, spend the majority of
the morning trying different wiring combinations.
Should be easy:
TV with 2 SCART Sockets
Sky Box with 2 SCART Sockets
Video with 2 SCART Sockets
Nintendo with 1 SCART Output
Stereo with 1 SCART Input (not strictly true but close
enough)
Should be able to wire TV to stereo so all sound from TV
will also go to stereo, should then be able to wire Sky
into TV, should then be able to wire Video into Sky and
lastly Nintendo into Video, when I do I get no sound from
stereo (bugger)
Finally after much head scratching I get it sorted.

Discover that my server is still rebooting itself,
worry
that the processor may have already fried and is merely
finishing its death throes. After investigation it appears
that it randomly decides to reboot when the lid is closed,
bizarre bahaviour, it can wait a random ammount of time,
implement a temporary fix by jamming a thin book under the
lid to stop it tripping the close detection button.

Get sidetracked away from DNS by Squid and Squirm,
have
fun getting them configured to block all traffic from ad
sites, then try to tackle getting the Apache proxy server
to route through them, is probably very easy but I can't
think straight atm.

Saturday:
Good intentions have a funny way of being easily forgot
until it's to late.
Had big plans for today, I should have gone to the gym
(still vainly trying to pursue fitness), then gone into
town with Ranj to look at DVD players, after that I could
devote the day to sorting out DNS.
What actually happend, I woke up late with the headache
from hell, said stuff it to going to the gym, met with
Ranj and tootled into town, wandered around aimelessly
looking like the living dead, brought some new CD's (PJ
Harvey, Daft Punk and Death in Vegas), then tootled home,
never made it as far as looking for DVD players, phoned on
the way home by the wife to ask if I could get some
compost (the moment the suns out she gets all these
gardening ideas).

Started tinkering with the server, came to the
conclusion
that it's overheating (the server is a small P233MMX
Laptop), after some dissasembly I've found that the
chassis cooling fan isn't being powered. Snipped the
wires and soldered on some new longer ones then
investigated wiring it into other sources of power on the
mboard, all too high, the fan wants 12V and all the ones
I'm finding are 48V, good for cooling, bad for noise.
Hit on a brain wave, dig out an old variable transformer,
cut of one of the connectors that I never use, set it to
14V and then wire it up to the fan, presto, it's running
slightly faster with no noticeable noise increase,
admitidly it now uses up an extra plug socket but so what.

Decide to leave tinkering for a while whilst I
investigate
storage in the bedroom (spurred on by the fact that whilst
looking for the tranformer I filled the living room with
all my cables and useless gizmo's), decide to buy some new
wardrobes and end up trying to fathom the strangest logic
ever.

Point: Acording to wife we can't afford two new
wardrobes
which with all the fittings come to about £350, so we
decide to buy one this month and one next. Get to Ikea
and walk out with no wardrobes but two bedside cabinets, a
new chest of drawers and a new TV unit, total cost £400,
all chosen by her, where's the logic?

Well my productivity time has been eaten away, got
back at
about 6:30 and finished putting Ikea furniture together at
about 10:00 and then spent a further 3 hours trying to
wire the SCART sockets up correctly, am now to tired to be
productive.

Friday:
Feel a bit of a fraud, have opened an advogato account
although the ammount of development I actually do is
minimal.

Never mind, I'll make it up with the ammount of
documentation I'm churning out (oh my how we love those
HOWTO's).

Trying to skive out the office, one of the first days
in
ages that the suns been shining and the skies are clear,
god I hate the British climate, problem, supposed to be
going into town for drinks, unfortunately this is one of
the few times that we have the option of a babysitter,
should I risk a womans wrath?

Hmmm, still have to finish the auto DNS section of the
Linux Advanced Server Howto, linking in the DHCPD to auto
update DNS records isn't as easy as it seems.

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